The purchase price of a video game may represent a substantial expenditure for a teenager or young adult. Often, prospective purchasers may wish to experience and play a game before actually making a purchase. One way to play a game before purchase is to borrow or rent a copy of the game, or visit a friend who has already purchased the game. However, many times retailers and other sellers may wish to create excitement and opportunities to play new (and even not-yet-released) games at the point of sale, trade shows and the like.
Commonly, retailers will provide game play kiosks that prospective purchasers can use to play full or demonstration versions of video games. In some cases, retailers or others make available demos of video games that have not yet been launched or released. Such demos allow retail buyers, members of the press, and other users to play limited versions of games that will become available in the future. Just like movie previews one sees in the movie theater before a new film's release date, such game demos can create excitement and anticipation for new games.
Demonstration versions of new and existing games thus generally allow game developers and other programmers to provide a limited or “demo” copy of their work to others. Such demos can be downloaded over a network, delivered on optical or other storage media, or delivered in other ways. Since demos are typically trimmed-down versions of real games, multiple works can often be stored and presented on the same demonstration media device. This may add to the complexity of the file structure on the device, but allows for easy and efficient delivery of many previewable works to end users.
In the past, when developing game demo software for storage CD, DVD or other storage media or delivery mechanism for demonstration purposes, an author often needed to run through a manual preparation process involving, for example, editing and running a number of batch files. This process was cumbersome and time consuming, and also often led to human errors caused by entering invalid data in a text based setting file.
To add to the challenge, demos often need to be prepared on a relatively expedited basis. For example, it is not uncommon for the game developer to request demo software or storage media to be prepared relatively rapidly after the demo game programming content has been completed. This places a lot of time pressure on the person asked to create the demo.
Additionally, if an existing demo were to be modified, the whole process would often need to be repeated, increasing the total time spent on the project and the chance for error. The person creating updated versions of the demonstration software also generally needed to know the technical details of a previous version of the demo, which meant that someone who had worked on the creation of the original demonstration media had to be present or extensive documentation needed to be maintained.
It is also desirable to provide demo software, packages or disks with multimedia capabilities. For example, it may be desirable to include, on a single demo disk or other storage medium, executable game demos as well as video, movie and sound clips. While such mixed media demo disks have been known in the past, they were generally created using a relatively painstaking process of individually handling and treating each file within the multimedia presentation. It would be desirable to provide some degree of automation to make such more complicated presentations easier to create and to augment and add to.
In addition, it would be desirable when creating demo software or presentations to provide an easy and effective way to preview the demo while it is still a work in process. Using at least some past manual preparation techniques, the author needed to create the entire demo before viewing it for effect. If modifications were required, the author would need to essentially “start from scratch” by making the necessary changes and then recreating the entire demo. In certain such prior arrangements and techniques, there was no ability to select and preview particular content for preview and execution by itself. Such an iterative process could end up requiring a lot of time to complete, making the process inefficient and sometimes difficult to complete on schedule.
The illustrative exemplary non-limiting implementations provide solutions in which the user no longer has to manually run involved processes such as a lengthy series of batch files, and which provides a full preview feature. Exemplary illustrative non-limiting implementations handle file conversion and copying. The exemplary illustrative non-limiting implementations also provide error checking features, which reduces the chance of human error corrupting demonstration media.
By providing a graphical interface for the user, the exemplary illustrative non-limiting implementations reduce or eliminate the need to manually edit text based setting files with a text editor.
Also, since the exemplary illustrative non-limiting implementations track changes made by the user, build and preview times are greatly reduced, as only files that have been edited since the last update need to be updated.
The exemplary illustrative non-limiting implementations also allow a user to preview all aspects of art resources on the demonstration media, thereby allowing the user to ensure that the proper art has been selected and loaded. The exemplary illustrative non-limiting implementations let the user preview the demonstration media as well, either in whole part or in segments, which adds to the accuracy of the demonstration media's contents.
The exemplary illustrative non-limiting implementations can also provide statistical readouts of available and used media space, so the user knows how much more content they can add to their demonstration media project.
Further exemplary illustrative non-limiting advantageous features include:                creation of demo disk projects that can be saved and loaded        creation of demo disk directory structures to store some or all content files for a demo disk project        instant previewing of created demo disks by pushing a button        building of proprietary video game platform or other disk images        previewing all image files during the editing process (screenshots, logos, controller screen and banners)        previewing sound effects and background music        arrangement and ordering of demo disk content files        statistical data table that shows used and available disk space before image creation        saving of statistical data for easy viewing        registering all resource files for a demo project and previewing resources (playable demos and movies)        use of a number of sub programs for demo disk creation, and calling them automatically for the user so he or she does not need to edit and run lengthy batch files.        demo project creation process is faster since running batch files from dozens of folders is no longer required (the user can now simply press a button and the tool will handle all the conversion and copying).        